


Companionable Solitude

by TheCosmicMushroom



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Insomnia, Mental Health Issues, Nightmares, Other, Panic Attacks, Post-Season/Series 01 Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Self-Acceptance, Suggestive Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28202757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCosmicMushroom/pseuds/TheCosmicMushroom
Summary: “His hands shoot up off his thighs and hover in the air before him, vibrating in his tremulous vision. Reality settles like snow, gradual and numbing, and Malcolm chokes on a sob. His fingers scrub trenches into his eyes, but nothing can erase the afterimage of that tiny, miserable room with its blood-red walls and bloodied history. He sees himself there, tethered to the wall, an animal leashed, and the grin on his lips only draws wider and wider.‘You have to accept the truth, Malcolm,’ his nightmare repeats, voice echoing in the vast emptiness between them. ‘You’ll destroy us both if you don’t.’”[In which Malcolm's subconscious has had enough of his self-destructive behavior and decides to intervene.]
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Malcolm Bright
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17
Collections: Prodigal Son Holidays Fic Exchange





	Companionable Solitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HoneyMayBee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyMayBee/gifts).



> I had a ton of fun writing this piece! It's a bit different from my normal work, so I hope you all enjoy it nonetheless.
> 
> And to you, my lovely friend May. I hope you have a fantastic holiday season 🎄🎁 and that this fic gives you everything you've been looking for from this pairing. ❤❤
> 
> This fic was beta'd by the incomparable [Ponderosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/pseuds/Ponderosa).

_“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” - Henry David Thoreau_

“I might have reminded you to keep an eye on the traumatized woman with a knife, but let’s be real. You wouldn’t have listened.”

The prosecution drones on, mouth twisting with disgust as she spits the details of Endicott’s death, but the words burning in Malcolm’s ears are not hers. Brow set in a harsh line, she falls silent, and it takes him longer than it should to realize she expects him to answer a question he hadn’t heard over the familiar voice reverberating inside his skull.

He clears his throat and shifts awkwardly in his seat. “Ah, I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?”

With a sneer, Ms. Hamilton—or Hamlen, he hardly remembers after hours in this godforsaken courtroom—approaches the witness stand with a stack of photos in her hand and fire in her eyes. “What I asked, Mr. Bright, was how you can expect this court to believe this,” she drops the papers on the lip of the stand, where they fan out from the impact, “was the product of self-defense.”

The papers—photos, he finds when he shuffles through them with trembling fingers—display Endicott’s injuries from every angle: the dozen or so downward punctures to his chest and the vicious slice across his throat, deep enough to crack through the thyroid cartilage and completely sever the sternohyoid and omohyoid muscles. He can recall the crunch, the hiss of the slide like a steak knife through a filet.

The memory of Ainsley’s eyes, wild with fury and undeniable pleasure, cuts him deeper, still.

“It would seem our father erred, waiting for the return of his prodigal son. So eager,” that same voice whispers, somewhere between curious and impressed. “Do you think he got to her after all? Or did she simply embrace a side of herself she’d kept repressed? It might do you some good to follow her lead.”

Malcolm has to force his hand to relax, the glossy page in his hand crinkled in a near-perfect fractal around his thumb. Carefully, he sets the photo down and crosses his quivering hands atop the pile, features schooled to affect an indifference belied by his swollen pupils.

“Nicolas Endicott came, uninvited, into my mother’s home, sexually assaulted my sister, threatened her, me, our family. He took great pleasure in describing in painstaking detail exactly how he intended to ruin us all, making sure we knew he could do it and more without consequence. That there was nothing we could do to stop him from doing whatever he wanted. She was terrified.” He allows a little quaver to sneak out into his voice and holds a shaking hand over his chest, watching from the corner of his eye the way a few of the jurors’ faces screw up. Even those who had maintained stoicism throughout the rest of his testimony looked unnerved. Ms. Hamilton notices it, too, if the sweat shimmer on her forehead is anything to go by. _“I_ was terrified. My sister saved my life, as well as her own, from a man who had just tried to murder Lieutenant Arroyo—”

“Mr. Bright, we aren’t here to discuss Mr. Endicott’s alleged crimes—” she tries to interject.

“—a man who has been more father to me than my biological one ever was,” he continues, regardless, blinking rapidly as moisture builds on his lower lashes. “He had my girlfriend murdered. He tried to hurt our mother. He would have hurt me. He would have hurt _her._ Tell me, what would you have done?”

“I think that’s quite enough, Mr. Bright,” Hamilton bites, glaring holes through him before matching back to the plaintiff’s table. The rigid set of her spine, the slight hang to her head, spark an inkling of guilt; the woman is only trying to do her job, even if her success would condemn his sister. “No further questions, Your Honor.”

As the bailiff escorts him from the witness stand, his eyes sweep over the jury pool, noting how twelve pairs of eyes—some cloudy with tears, others dry as a bone, all projecting sympathy—track his path out of the courtroom.

“Profiling the jury, playing to their empathy. Well done, you.” The words flow like Martin’s, but the voice… that’s all his own. “Dad would be so proud.”

* * *

The lawyer Mother hired coaches Ainsley how best to use the momentum he had built to swing the jury. They deliberate for less than one hour.

For all that they absolved his sister of guilt, Malcolm can’t quite bring himself to offer the same leniency to himself.

* * *

“You really need to learn to let go. They say stress is a silent killer, you know,” the apparition wearing his face muses into the ringing silence, but Malcolm refuses to acknowledge it.

Despite his best efforts, he catches movement in the room behind him in the glass beside his head. He focuses on the corporeal details: the feel of cold concrete seeping through the seat and legs of his pants, the solid weight of the metal door along his side, the smooth surface against his forehead, the impenetrable darkness in the hall outside this infinite prison, his fingernails digging into his palms. None of these things is strictly real, a fact he knows well on this, the fifth such occasion his mind has chosen to lock him in Martin’s Claremont cell.

A heavy sigh shatters his calm, rips him from his practiced composure, so he jerks back with a growl, swiveling toward the doppelgӓnger that has plagued his every conscious moment since Ainsley opened Endicott’s jugular. The man who is him and not stares back, expression perfectly blank as he leans forward in his chair, elbows braced on his knees. Slowly, his head lists to one side, and he says, “You’re going to have to accept it eventually.”

With a scoff, Malcolm shakes his head, upper lip peeling away from his teeth. “Accept what? You? You’re a hallucination brought on by emotional trauma and an ongoing inability to get a good night’s sleep. And here I am,” he spits, turning away, “talking to you as if ‘you’ even exist.” After a deep breath, he wraps his arms more tightly around his chest. “It’s fine, I just need to wake up.”

A bark of laughter precedes quiet words that chase him up through layers of subconsciousness.

“Interesting how you think I won’t follow you there.”

* * *

Gil’s resting face twists, whether from pain or the mucus adhering to Malcolm’s eyes, he can’t say. The smooth cotton under his fingertips, soft and comforting at first, has turned abrasive, reddening his skin wherever it touches. Hours pass like minutes or days, and never in between, so he has to contort clumsy fingers, white and bloodless from the chill of winter radiating from the window, into his pocket to retrieve his phone. The smooth plastic slips from his loose, uncoordinated grasp a few times before he manages.

4:54 a.m.

How long have I been here? He throws a bleary glance over his shoulder to the nurse’s station, where a couple techs lean over the counter, chatting with a woman seated behind a computer. None of them so much as twitch in his direction. A hum rumbles low in his throat, the closest to appreciation he can muster in his state. “They make exceptions for family, I guess.”

A chuckle startles him, and he pivots back toward Gil, who hasn’t moved, not a hair out of place. He spares hardly a moment to confusion before the phantom tingle of hands brush over his shoulders, a breathless breath ghosting over his nape. “Gil isn’t your father, Malcolm,” his own voice murmurs, tickling against the shell of his ear, “no matter how badly you want him to be. You have to accept the truth.”

He turns toward the prickle creeping along his skin from under the “hand” on his shoulder, and finds, rather than the offending limb, a worn oatmeal cardigan where his single-breasted overcoat once lay. A chain rattles as he jolts in place, dragging his gaze down to his lap where he half-expects to find his wrists cuffed to his waist, blinding prison white in place of a navy Valentino suit. The floor slab of dusty cement underfoot swims, and that line of red, the only thing separating sanity from madness, dances from his right to his left and back again.

His hands shoot up off his thighs and hover in the air before him, vibrating in his tremulous vision. Reality settles like snow, gradual and numbing, and Malcolm chokes on a sob. His fingers scrub trenches into his eyes, but nothing can erase the afterimage of that tiny, miserable room with its blood-red walls and bloodied history. He sees himself there, tethered to the wall, an animal leashed, and the grin on his lips only draws wider and wider.

“You have to accept the truth, Malcolm,” his nightmare repeats, voice echoing in the vast emptiness between them. “You’ll destroy us both if you don’t.”

He fights gravity for control of his eyelids, pries them apart first by sheer will and then with his fingers. A part of him wonders if he’s caught the attention of any of the staff with his antics, what they think of him here, bedside to a comatose man, desperately holding his eyes open like a man depraved.

For good measure, he doesn’t turn around.

Once enough adrenaline has made its circuit through his body, drowsiness momentarily banished to the edges of his consciousness, he lets his hands fall away. Without awaiting permission from his brain, his fingers curl loosely around Gil’s.

“I can’t do this, Gil,” he croaks, throat like a desert, eyes full of rain. His head bows low over where their hands lie clasped, and if a couple drops spill from his lashes, there’s no one around to see them.

* * *

The show must go on, as they say and, so it would seem, must murder. The department brings in an uptight suit from another precinct as a stand-in for Gil, unaware of or perhaps unconcerned by the hit to the team’s morale. With a frosty veneer, the man laid his ground rules, his expectations, harmless as bids for control went, but enough to spark dissent in the ranks.

After an hour of bitter arguing between the detectives and their new boss, peppered with none-too-subtle digs at the usefulness of their “pet consultant,” Malcolm considers on the way home if he should count himself unemployed.

* * *

“Bright?”

Leaves crunch underfoot, shades of green and brown swirling, swirling on all sides. “POLICE” written in garish yellow stands out like a beacon on the back of whatever uni marches before him.

“Bright?”

The ground rocks nauseatingly beneath Malcolm’s feet, and only the lack of blue around him confirms he hasn’t drifted out to sea in his daze. Sound means nothing. Words, even less.

“Bright!”

A vice clamps down on his bicep, wrenching him to a stop, though it takes him a moment to realize it. He stares at the graceful fingers digging into his arm, follows them up to a dizzying face, all hazy outline and smeared colors. In the jumble, he picks out eyes, shining with sunlight and worry, maybe irritation. He recognizes them.

“Dani, I’m fine,” comes the automated response, falling easily past his lips in a decent approximation of his normal voice. “I’m just tired.”

She hears him, that much he knows for certain, but Dani has never been an easy read, emotions buried behind layers of mistrust and practiced apathy. Whether out of exasperation or acceptance, she lets the matter drop along with his arm, stepping around him without another word. Hot on her heels, another amorphous blur, too large to be anyone but JT, edges around him, keeping safe distance as though he expects Malcolm to blow, throwing shrapnel and the kind of ugly emotions most men disguise with misplaced anger and misogyny.

He trails behind them, and his mind behind him, folding in on itself over the simple act of walking. Steadily, his vision clears, kaleidoscopic patterns solidifying to recognizable shapes: trees, rocks, dirt, and Edrisa, elbow-deep in an eviscerated corpse. Her wide smile as her eyes land on him feels threatening in a way he can’t explain—the product of too many sleepless nights or the ceaseless ache in his empty gut. He suspects it relates more to the dangerous flash of teeth burned into his memory, the stretch of his own lips curled around The Surgeon’s smile.

Hopefully, the tight-lipped twitch reciprocates hers well enough.

She launches into details. When the vic was found, the likely time and cause of death, his name, but Malcolm absorbed it all more than heard it. A building roar, like the ocean at high tide, drowns out all voices save the one he hates most.

“Look at the edges of that stomach wound, the punctures on his arms,” the shade murmurs, soft like the lick of waves over sand. “They’ll suppose an animal got to him, mangled what was left of him, but you know what the bluntness of the bites means.”

The minimal filter he’d worked hard over the years to stretch over the yawning chasm between his brain and mouth had long since frayed and unraveled entirely under the careless hand of exhaustion. With a weak gesture, he indicates the dead man. “Bite marks on the torso and arms. Dull and wide. Human.”

Edrisa’s brightness fades, confused at his blatant lack of eloquence, but Dani and JT follow her lead, exchanging a worried glance before blanketing him with their attention instead. He ignores them all in favor of teetering back up the path, his throbbing pulse beating beneath his temples. Rocks and sticks trip him up a couple times, but he makes it to the car unscathed.

His reflection in the passenger-side window grins back at him.

He says nothing and climbs in.

* * *

The pinned photos on the caseboard come to life, the sightless eyes filling with tears, lips parted on a scream, a formless shadow crawling up the man’s writhing body, gnawing away at his skin, his organs, his bones. When he can no longer stand to watch, he turns around.

“Edrisa’s report confirms Thomas McElwain died of blood loss. It also confirms the bite wounds were made by human teeth.” He drifts off for a moment, thoughts wrapped up in visceral carnage. Dani harrumphs and jostles him from his trance. “Cannibals with no sexual component to their kills typically fall within one of two profiles: the severely schizophrenic or sadistic psychopaths. A schizophrenic cannibal acts out of fear. For them, cannibalism is a self-defense reaction to a perceived threat. Their survival hinges on the destruction or,” he waves at the photos, “assimilation of the threat.”

His eyes slip closed on a sigh, weary to his marrow, but even that glimpse of Martin’s cell—of its solitary occupant—has him snapping them open again. Not quickly enough to miss the curious hum, the quiet, “You already know which profile fits this killer, Malcolm. Stop dallying.”

“With a sadistic cannibal,” he says, over-loud in the small space like it might silence the words he can’t ignore, “the act itself is merely a means to an end. Their ego drives them to take out deep-seated frustrations on others in an extraordinary way. We’re dealing with the latter.”

Captain Palmer grunts, pinning him beneath an assessing gaze. “And what gives you that impression, Mr. Bright?”

A derisive snort sounds behind his eardrums, a scalding tone accompanying. “The man could hardly find the needle in a haystack, let alone another bit of hay. You’d think he would appreciate the help.”

Brows hanging low over his eyes, Malcolm grumbles, “Think about where we found Mr. McElwain. A prominent jogging trail in Central Park, one our killer knew would lead to his discovery. Now, consider the positioning of the body. Spread-eagle, not a speck of dirt on his front, and no defensive wounds. Not a drop of blood on the dirt. He was killed elsewhere and taken to the park, dumped somewhere he would be found, and carefully positioned. Does that sound like the work of a severely schizophrenic person to you?”

“Bright,” Dani warns under her breath, bulging eyes darting between Palmer’s stormy expression and his own listless one.

The captain’s knife-point glare locks onto his face. “Not sure I care for your tone.”

When Malcolm opens his mouth, he has a few choice words picked out, something that toes the line without crossing it. Instead, his lips move independent of his thoughts, limbs animating around another man’s skeleton. “Well, Captain,” the other Malcolm responds breezily, pushing to their shared feet in a smooth motion, “you have your profile. If you need someone to break that into smaller words for you, I suppose you’ll have to ask your team.”

Nothing can adequately describe the experience of his body beelining for the exit independent of his will. A breath of disbelieving shock thickens the air around him, the weight of dozens of eyes marking his trajectory until the entrance door hides him from their scrutiny. Sunlight warms his cheeks, soaks into the black of his coat, and the creature wearing his skin sighs.

“Stop,” he says, vocal cords paralyzed in his throat. His shoulders creep up to kiss at his earlobes, muscles bunching tightly before falling slack as his hands slide into his coat pockets. His order goes forgotten.

Together, they wander the streets, offering passersby vapid smiles and cold eyes. The sidewalk continues into eternity, cracked concrete crunching underfoot in a perpetual loop of loose gravel and discarded trash. His knees and lungs burn by the time they finally put a door between them and the cacophonous outside world.

“Alone at last,” his double uses his mouth to say before charging up the stairs to the main level and throwing the deadbolt behind them. His body spins and twists in an elaborate dance through the foyer, waltzing straight through the bedroom, coat and tie drifting to the ground where they lie in heaps, a tuneless melody buzzing in this throat. Dread pools in his gut as his hands dig the bottle of chloroform out of the medicine cabinet, his own self-satisfied smirk staring back at him from the mirror above the sink.

“Don’t,” he whispers, voice dispersing into nothing before it can be heard. He hates himself for the needle-thin note of pleading that seems to endure where his words could not.

Unaffected, his stone-steady fingers tug the hand towel off its hook. Beneath the pipette, soft white darkens as droplets fall, soaking into the Egyptian cotton. With a final flourish, his body crumples into the tub, skull cradled by the sloping rim. “Don’t be afraid, Malcolm,” he hears as his hand holds the rag aloft, gripped lightly like the stem of a champagne flute in a toast. “It’ll be just like old times.”

A sweet and acerbic scent, like chocolate pudding in a hospital bed, washes over him.

His world dissolves in pixels, and in the lasting darkness, he finds peace.

* * *

“Malcolm, you can’t hide from me here.”

The slap of skin on skin ricochets off painted cement, ringing in his ears despite the desperate press of his palms. He peers longingly out into the blackened hallway outside, imagining he can spot the suggestion of doorways in perfect darkness. Count to ten then do it again, he thinks.

“Is this about the time I stabbed you?” The question pierces layers of flesh and sinew, punching through his hands-turned-earplugs like tissue paper. In the glass, a stab of beige cuts through red, but he focuses only on the blackness beyond it. “You can’t still blame me for that, can you? It worked, after all.”

“Inhaling high concentrations of chloroform can cause hallucinations,” he says so softly he feels the resonance in his chest more than hears it. “It only exacerbated the problem my insomnia caused. I just need to wait for the chloroform to process through my system and get some sleep. I’ll be fine. I’m fine.”

“Are you?” the voice asks from closer than before, winding gently around his shoulders like an embrace. “We both know the truth, but for some reason, you’re still reluctant to accept it.” A thump sounds from just behind him. He tenses in anticipation. “I’ve let this go on long enough, Malcolm. I won’t allow you to kill us.”

“It’s fine,” he promises the shattered countenance he hardly recognizes as his own anymore. “This is just a nightmare, and I’m fine.”

“You’ll find I’m more than real, Malcolm.”

He hates the abrasive itch, like sandpaper brushing bare skin. The voice he knows and the words he doesn’t, the confidence that grows harder and harder to reject as fantasy by the second.

“Whatever you think of Martin and my similarities to him, don’t forget it was you who built this stage and cast me as leading man.”

The single thread holding his tattered seams together snaps, and he whirls around, loose strands of hair flying wild around his head like a splintered halo. _“You_ aren’t _real._ None of this is.”

A vicious peal of laughter prefaces the grin that always stretches and stretches, too wide to be anything but sinister. “And yet,” his reflection sweeps his arms wide, eyes tracing the dimensions of their stonework surroundings before sinking back into Malcolm’s face like sharpened canines, “here we are.”

“Really?” he asks, feigning a derisive snort lacking authenticity. “Where ‘we’ are is nothing more that the product of a sleep-deprived mind. You, you’re… just an attempt to rationalize some lingering trauma from playing witness to my sister murdering a man in cold blood.”

His delusion inclines his head, brows twitching up in complement to his smirk. Malcolm hears the words he doesn’t speak.

“No,” he snarls, pushing to his knees, set on the path to complete denial, a long night of standing vigil at the door for the first sign of impending consciousness.

A hand shoots out and cinches around his bicep.

His pulse stills, the final beat rippling out from him in a tumultuous wave, and he turns. The pale fingers are familiar down to the chipped nails and picked-raw cuticle. He darts his eyes from wrist to restraint belt, tracing the line where a chain used to connect the two. For an instant, the air before him wavers, the gravity of his panic warping light and time itself, until, for one frozen lifetime, it’s Martin standing behind him, Martin holding him back, Martin and his manic grin stealing the air from his lungs, and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, can’t—

“Malcolm.”

The mirage vanishes between blinks, his own face superseding his father’s, though the smarmy grin has collapsed into something solemn. “No matter how determined you are to believe it, I’m not your father.”

He tries to jerk away, head twitching side to side to side, like he can dislodge the meaning behind the words from his brain, but they burrow in, write themselves into the gray matter, into the electrical signals, into his DNA. When the hand on his arm clamps tighter, an iron band branding into his skin, he has no choice but to look into himself and see.

“Nico’s severed arm. The man you threw from the roof. Your crushed trapezium. Our father’s punctured heart.”

Malcolm flinches from each reminder of his off-kilter judgment. A caress, gentle as the hand on his arm is harsh, cups his cheek, and he fixes in place, eye gone owlish. “These choices saved lives,” each syllable kisses his skin on the breath they ride, a reminder of the shriveling gap between them, “and Martin played no role in making them. You know who did, Malcolm.”

When their lips brush on his name, a jolt of electricity scorches a path along his nerves and finally gives him the strength to pull away. He lands smack on his ass then skitters away like a frightened child, shrinking back from the silhouette of himself, the light around him fading while the shadow chasing him across the floor grows.

“Just imagine, Malcolm.”

The light behind his simulacrum flares white-hot like a dying star, blinding as the truth he can no longer deny, dazzling and terrifying even as the world begins to fade.

“Imagine what we could accomplish together.”

* * *

Flickering blue light paints a story onto Malcolm’s slack features, but a disconnect between his eyes and occipital lobe prevents him from comprehending the scene. Behind the reporter, a blonde too much like Ainsley with her retro aesthetic and naked determination, a team of ESU techs wheel a pair of gurneys laden with body bags. Some part of him must understand, if not the context, the meaning as tears leak from his bloodshot eyes.

“They really are clueless without us.”

“Shu’up,” he breathes, tongue too big for his mouth, teeth too sharp against the rugged flesh. Tears slip from between his eyelids, and he climbs to unsteady feet. With ponderous steps, he picks his way through no man’s land like a dead man walking, shambling over fallen barstools and discarded books, shuffling through the shrapnel and detritus until he reaches the bathroom.

The man in the mirror grows less recognizable by the day with his sunken cheeks and sallow complexion, a ghost clinging to its rotten corpse. He leans in closer to pick out the individual lines of swollen blood vessels drawing road maps through his sclera.

“You’re killing us, Malcolm.”

Superimposed over him, his other self watches with effortless aloofness through calculating eyes. The deeper he peers into his own cavernous pupils, the clearer Nietzsche's warning resounds.

“You gaz’d back,” he accuses in a slur, intoxicated by the realization.

His copy only smiles.

Before he can muster the strength to overcome the urge, his right arm draws back to propel his clenched fist into the mirror, breaking into hysterical laughter as his own image fractures with the glass. Fissures open in his knuckles, the smear of blood attests to that, but he can’t feel them until the third impact when the wooden panel of the cabinet door splits from the force.

He spits a howl of rage, of pain, of grief, and of defeat, clutching at the mangled snarl of his hand and the last vestiges of his sanity trickling from between his fingers like sand. Autopilot guides him through rinsing away the blood, picking the largest shards from the open wounds with care. When the water runs cold and his body colder, he slinks from the room with pinkened droplets falling from his fingertips and a gaping hole opening in his chest. With a sob, he drops onto his mattress, face buried in the sheets so he can’t hear himself say, “I know you.”

Once, he’s started, he can’t stop, the acknowledgement tumbling from his lips like a desperate mantra.

A weight settles across his back, solid and comforting as it crushes him into the bed, lungs struggling to pull in oxygen. As black eats away at the edges of his sight, a soft warmth not unlike a hand trails over the nape of his neck, a low voice rumbling beside his ear.

“Any fool can know, Malcolm. The point is to understand.”

* * *

The shrill cry of his ringtone startles him to awareness. After a few blinks, he rolls onto his back and stands on legs that don’t shake, eyes that remain focused. He breathes in deep, taking in the world as if for the first time, childish glee bubbling up through his throat like a giggle. Another ring reminds him why he’d risen, and he dashes over to the kitchen counter to answer.

“This is Bright.”

The line remains silent, a held breath, then Dani’s voice comes through. “Well, someone sounds chipper this morning.”

He hesitates, looking down at his hand, worse in unforgiving sunlight, then around the disaster of his loft. Rather than reply, he huffs a laugh.

“Listen, I don’t know how much news you watch, but we have three new bodies in the morgue and nothing to work with. Palmer,” she pauses then sighs. “JT and I convinced him to bring you back in. We need you on this. Can you meet us at the station?”

“I told you they needed us,” comes the thought, cocky in message but not in intent. For once, the dissociated voice doesn’t bring with it a sudden shock of fear. Only the reassuring weight of surety. Of truth.

He lets his eyes fall shut, unsurprised to find Martin’s cell awaiting him. Across the red line stands a man he knows well, dressed to the nines, hair combed back from his searching face.

“I can help you,” his own voice speaks, and in the space of the moment, he can’t be sure which of them it came from. With precise movements, he turns on his heel, stepping up to the security door and the world alight just on the other side. He raises a hand to knock. “Are you ready for me?”

His mouth falls open, lungs inflating with oxygen and resolution. Before the air can breeze through his larynx, give voice to the answer he’d known even before he opened his eyes, his other half crosses easily over the barrier and presses against his back. Not a breadth of space remains between them, and as he raises his head, Malcolm feels lips against his neck. Arms reach around, cup his own and bring them in close, wrapping tight around his chest like a cocoon.

He wonders what they might become.

Every inch of him catches fire, searing and cleansing and arousing as one breaches the other, skin splitting to accommodate their intrusion into each other. “Penetrated” Gabrielle had said, and he feels it now in his core, filling every corner, every crack, lancing straight through to where it had always been. Heat pools in his gut, igniting him from the inside out until there is no _me_ and _him_ anymore.

All that’s left is Malcolm.

“Bright?”

“Yes,” he gasps, blood boiling through his veins, breathless from the touch he can still feel on his neck, his back, his insides. “I’ll be there, Dani.”

“You don’t sound… are you okay?” He can see her look now, like the one she leveled on him in the conference room last time. The look that asks more the longer he observes it, asks if he can handle this, if it’s this case or the next that drives him mad like his father.

He feels it in his head, the persistent hum of discomfort dispersed into quiet, and in his heart beating steady in his chest. Soft lips flutter against his sternum then his throat, the whispered promise writing itself into his skin.

_I’m with you._

A grin tugs his lips up and up, stretching wide then wider.

“Never better.”


End file.
